I really don't understand why we hear from this guy as much as we do...

Heh... 32Gb of RAM in my W520...

I've had one month off since July 2010, plus two weeks this Festive season just past.

For the first year I averaged 50 hours a week, since September 2011 I've done a straight 37.5 hours per week and no more.

I have however worked in IT in one way or another for over 20 years, any many of those was as a corporate slave.

It's not a job, it's not employment, it's business. I sincerely doubt HR even know he's done work there.

I'm a contractor, I go in to solve their problems, US $90 an hour, when I'm done, I'm done. The Invoice is in the post.

I never have to interface with HR, I'm not looking for Health Insurance, Gym membership or any of that stuff, leave that too the employees.

If I had a PhD then it would probably go quite a way for me, might not get a potential employee too far, but then that's not what PhDs are for!

I work in Oxford at the moment, and one thing is for sure, next time I get into a cab and the taxi driver wants to have a conversation I now have a very good reason to ignore him and exercise my right to silence.

This is fine, until Linux put the Cake in it's sauce code, then Microsoft sued for patent infringement.

As someone who has worked for an ISP this comes as no surprise.

At the end of the day we know what the customers want - they want free films, free music and pirated software. The Pirate Bay provides the means to locate such stuff.

While the most prolific users are a problem, ISPs provide access to this medium - if we block the P2P sharing sites then our customers will go elsewhere, and in a market which is highly competitive we cannot afford to lose such a large section of our market.

I dropped out of University and eventually persued vocational and on-the-job training. I now earn the equivalent of US $175,000 a year and consider myself reasonably comfortable.
While getting a degree could be considered a nice 'lift' up the ladder early on, graduates are often considered rather green in industry and often the type of people who won't like to get their hands dirty - to be honest, in these economic times, that isn't what employers want!

Yes, but if you check out the top500.org - the list of the 500 known fastest 'supercomputers' you'll see that they all achieve their benchmark through parallelizing their tasks across multiple cores.

I think it is safe to say that all modern supercomputers achieve their 'power' in this way - I've not seen any terahertz single-core/processor systems on the horizon, and don't expect to see them.

Our CEO at a company I used to work for sent out an all-employee mail detailing a salary freeze for all employees and voluntary redundancies. Moments later the CFO sent out an email to his accounts team detailing that their pay-rise would not be affected and that they should not consider redundancy... needless to say, the hapless git hit reply-all...

Sometimes it's not necessarily what you're communicating to a server that is interesting, but which servers you are communiating with!!

I happen to be typing this from a Dutch Hotel.

This particular one has free wireless, and there is no way to identify a particular system accessing the net to a room. In fact, without staying here I could still probably sit in the car park or hotel lobby and access the internet from there. There's even a PC in the lobby with anonymous access from it.

Granted it does use a "Hotspot" login page (just need to check a checkbox and click login), so I suppose that could be modified to have someone provide a room number or PIN etc...

Changing the way things work though will invariably be a pain though, especially if you need to access the Internet over the weekends and the authentication system breaks down or something else goes wrong... (as seems to be quite common with the systems in many hotels). Reception tend to look at you with rather blank faces when this happens, and it usually isn't fixed until a weekday.

Leave the university and do a "code rewrite", as long as they can't prove you copy and pasted the work that you did under their employment, they have little legal standing and unless this is a real programming gem I doubt they will send the lawyers after you... just look at what happenned to SCO.